Episode #96: How To Keep On Top Of Everything

Procrastination is the bane of efficiency. Actually we all know well what we should be doing, but we just keep putting it off. Today we will look at some practical steps to get us better organized and become able to move forward and make progress.

Paper piled high on all flat surfaces, email in-boxes bursting at the seams, project and completion deadlines menacing your normal calm equilibrium. Days fly by punctuated by too many meetings, the quality of which are usually abysmal, and the entertainment factor zero.

Keeping up to date with your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Line, Instagram, accounts saps your mind and body. The black, oily tsunami of stuff just keeps coming, no matter what you do. How do you grow when you are constantly being pushed backward, fighting for survival, swimming against a roiling sea of stuff?

Here are some ideas on how to create interrupt in your life and master the daily turmoil:

Take stock of the issues and create some clarity about the field of battle confronting you. List up the offending items that are overwhelming you, “speak their name” to make them visible and less daunting.

We cannot do everything, but we can do the most important thing, so start by deciding which nightmare is the highest priority. Create “block times” in your schedule, which are appointments with yourself and recorded in your diary. For that period of protected time attack the offending item with gusto, starting by deleting all the backlog of stuff whose use by date has passed.

If it is paper, throw it out and file the rest into one file, arranged in priority order for the next assault. If it is email, select alphabetic filtering, so you dismiss masses of emails at one go. With the remainder, move items into new folders called Priority 1, Priority 2, Priority 3.

For projects, stop the bees buzzing in your head, by writing them all down on a long list and then attach priorities to them. Start working on the main priority projects first.

Meetings are tricky, because often we have little in the way of choice and few options. Consider your compulsory attendance character building – “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”.

For business social media, face the fact that you have become a heinous glutton, and have seriously over indulged. Be violent toward non-essentials.

Truncate the deluge, sort, prioritise and curate.